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A 

Chopin Nocturne 

and 

Other Sketches 


Two hundred copies privately 
printed for the author 
November, 1900 


A Chopin Nocturne and 
Other Sketches ^ ^ 
V* by Fannie Kimball Reed 

'V 


Thoic that come to see 
Only a show or /wo, and so agree 
The play may pass . — Henry viii 


CLEVELAND: Privately 
printed for the Author, 1900 




881 36 


Library of Congre** 

Two Copies Received 

DEC 141900 

SECOND COPY 

Ofl(iv«red to 

OROtft DIVISION 

DEC 28 1900. 


>1 


U 

Cj? 


Copyright, 1900 
BY 

Fannie Kimball Reed 


Contents 


Prologue .... 

7 

Grimma .... 

14 

A Day in the Harz Mountains 

24 

Hildesheim 

• 30 

On the Hills of Weimar 

43 

Jena .... 

• 47 

Padua .... 

60 

Utrecht .... 

65 

In the Scheibenholz 

. 76 

Delft .... 

81 

A Sunset .... 

. 90 

A Sunday in Amsterdam . 

• 95 

The Home-Coming 

• 105 

Epilogue .... 

108 


V 











Prologue 

It was holiday time, and in a room on the 
top floor of a German pension three girls had 
just finished having their tea. They were 
three musicians who, having little money and 
less time, had decided to remain in Leipsic and 
keep up the routine of their work. The walls 
of the room were covered with casts and pho- 
tographs ; on a chair was a violin, and a concert 
piano littered with music stood by a window 
looking down into an open court. 

This court was the center of a huge stone 
block, and from the window one might witness 
those dramas common to the back doors of a 
neighborhood, and not devoid of that grotesque 
humor with which the commonplace is some- 
times colored. 

At the end of the room, opposite the win- 
dow, two of the girls were lounging on a couch 
that did duty for a bed by night, now gay 


7 


Q Cljoptn Hoctumc 


with rugs and cushions. One of them still 
held her violin bow in her hand as she leaned 
against the shoulder of the other, whose dark 
eyes shone beneath her half-lowered eyelids ; 
she was a singer studying Wagnerian roles 
under a famous master. A small girl half 
leaning on the keyboard, was picking out with 
veiled sweetness a nocturne of Chopin. As 
the monochromatic tones fell from her delicate 
fingers they seemed scarcely to penetrate the 
gathering dusk ; they shone palely through it 
like crescent moons. 

“ Chopin in this half-light makes me think 
of the dusk of Italy, I don’t know why,” said 
the violinist, arranging a pillow under her head. 

The girl at the piano looked over her shoul- 
der. ‘ ‘ Interpret for me. ’ ’ 

She rose on her elbow. “Very well, but 
give me a little time. ’ ’ 

“You shall have two measures of it.” 

The dark girl raised slowly her sleepy eye- 
lids. “Remember the dusk of Italy,” she 
said. 

There was silence for a little, and then the 
girl began speaking in a soft monotonous voice. 


8 


ani> ©tljer Slietcljes 


The monologue seemed to diffuse itself into 
the tones of the piano, which shone through 
the dusk like stars or the pale light of the 
young moon. 

* ♦ ♦ 

We three went into the olive woods to pick 
violets. We crouched close to the earth as the 
peasants do, and in the dusky light we might 
have been those toilers, who getting their all 
from the earth, in the end come to bear a 
strange and terrible resemblance to it. Above 
us were the twisted and black columns of those 
antique trees, some a thousand years old. 
Over their heads they threw, in the abandon 
of an ever returning youth, the mist-like dra- 
pery of their leaves; the subtle half-color of 
moonlight, it floated there, like an almost 
impalpable powder blown into the drenched 
air. 

The ground was strewn with violets, with 
scarlet anemones, and white and yellow jon- 
quils. In the west the sun burned low; and as 
its last light fell on the hedge of orange trees, 
their fruit turned slowly to flame. 


9 


Cl Cljoptn iloctume 


But what enchanted the eye, sweet as first 
love and with as swift feet, was a row of little 
peach and almond trees crowned with wreaths 
of blossoms. Behind the wall they stood, 
children of the spring. For a moment the 
eye drank their beauty, but in that cup was 
the distillation of a longing sadness. 

The shadows crept along the wall. We 
heard the sound of the sea, then it seemed to 
die away. A child’s voice rang out, then all 
was still again. The sun went lower, it began 
to darken. 

There was a half vanishing of the wood into 
the dusk, but still the little trees stood out, their 
blossoms smiling ever with their sweet lips; 
and as we crouched there on the ground we 
felt the violets slipping from our loosed fingers. 

Silent as sleep lay the garden where stood 
the young trees whose blossoms smiled ever 
with sweet lips ; sad and sweet like first love. 
And the enchantment was this — that the heart 
would stay their swift passing, but could not, 
and in the sadness of hopeless longing their 
beauty was born. So said one of us, but she 
was an Italian. 


10 


anJ) ©tljcr Sfcetctjcs 


A woman came down the narrow lane 
between the walls ; she hushed in a soft voice 
the child she carried in her arms. Suddenly 
a bell rang out; it was the Angelus. We still 
crouched on the ground, our eyes turned 
upward. Someone murmured, Jesu Christi, 
But still I saw with longing sadness only the 
little trees whose blossoms trembled in the 
light wind. 

♦ * * 

The girl at the piano struck the final minor 
chord. “It’s Chopin, but not Italy. You 
have joined the decadents. ’ * 

“Too much work,” the girl replied lan- 
guidly. “Work, always the gray of work; 
life has no scarlet. ’ * 

“ The world’s outside and 'tis summer,’’ said 
the singer, looking out of the window where 
the Pleiades shone above the roofs. 

“But how can we go away; for one thing 
we must leave our friend next door who plays 
a French horn all day with the aspiration of 
belonging to the Gewandhaus orchestra, but 
doomed in the end — such is one of the little 


11 


Q Cljoptn Hoctume 

ironies of this life — to the obscurity of a village 
band.” 

“ Why trouble about him — he loves his des- 
tiny and his horn.” The pianist leaned both 
elbows on the keyboard. * ‘ Give me leave, 
and like Puck, I’ll put a girdle around the 
world in forty minutes. ’ ’ 

“We all know you can talk,” said the 
singer; “but can you be stopped, there’s the 
rub ? ” 

“ For a reasonable amount I can be,” sighed 
the pianist, getting up to light the candles. 

The violinist went over to a desk and opened 
a drawer. “ I know a girl who made many a 
journey, who saw the world, its domes and 
towers, and men and women, as on a painted 
screen; and heard too its movements, its 
appassionatas and adagios.” 

The pianist smiled. “ I move she be heard. 
Why should silence monopolize her? If she 
pipes gayly, I, for one, will dance.” 

The singer looked over the shoulder of the 
violinist. ‘ ‘ It looks interesting enough, ’ ’ she 
said, turning over some yellowed sheets of 
manuscript. “ I move she be heard.” 


12 


an5 ©tljer Sfeetcljes 


But the girl shook her head. “ It’s too late. 
See — the stars are shining above the roofs! 
Her wanderjahr was done long since. Tomor- 
row when the sun is there ’* — she pointed just 
above the flying figures on the roof of the 
conservatoire — “ we will go with her outside, 
into the world. ’ ’ 



13 


d Cl^opin Hocturnc 


Grimma 

Were you ever in Grimma? There is noth- 
ing there to see and we saw it in half a day — 
nothing but the cloister from which the nun 
Katherine Van Bora escaped to marry Luther. 
Going over on the train William recited to me 
the picturesque legends which have been told 
of this escape. We are polite and call them 
legends, otherwise the reputation of those 
days for veracity might suffer. 

There is a story that Luther fell in love 
with a letter she wrote him and demanded her 
release to marry her ; and there is an account 
of her and nine other nuns being smuggled 
in beer-casks and driven at a mad pace to the 
castle of the elector, somebody or other, I 
have forgotten whom now — and it does not 
much matter as by this time he has probably 
forgotten the incident himself. 

Grimma has its public gardens, old and 


14 


ani) ©tljcr Sketcljes 


quaint, from which reach out long avenues of 
trees whose branches grow so low on their 
moss-covered trunks that the roadways and 
walks beneath seem to sleep in perpetual 
twilight. 

There are great sleepy swans floating on the 
stagnant ponds and the place looks as though 
it had been enchanted flve hundred years 
before. But where are the knights and ladies 
who used to whisper beneath these same 
trees? 

Instead, we saw swaggering down the 
avenue a military band in gay hussar uni- 
form — the plumes on their red shakos nodding 
as they came along with cavalier tread. The 
blue and silver of their uniform gave the 
necessary dash and splash of color to the 
picture ; and what a background it was, that 
old sleeping avenue ! One could imagine what 
a crack regiment must be to a small place like 
Grimma. We asked if there was to be music 
that evening and they answered no, but that 
they played outside while the officers had sup- 
per. Such is the life of an officer in Germany. 

Grimma lies by the Mulde, a stately river 


16 


d Ctjopin Hoctume 


with beautiful wooded hills rising on both sides 
of it. Along the base of these hills we walked 
for a mile and a half till we came upon a 
yellow signboard with an arrow pointing to 
where the cloister hides itself in vines and 
foliage. 

“ The cloister, ’ ’ one says ; but there is nothing 
left but stone walls with great arches, once 
doors and windows, through which on this 
summer day butterflies were flying. It was 
pastorally still ; even the shouts of some small 
boys rioting near by in a mud-puddle could 
not disturb the peaceful silence. ^ Who would 
connect this scene with the square, bull necked 
Luther, with the terrible struggles of the 
Reformation? !^One could scarcely think, with- 
out a sigh, of the beautiful Katherine and her 
sister nuns stealing from the twilight of this 
sheltered place, \ into a ’ storm-beaten world, 
to find there their destinies in men battling 
against the sacred customs of their religion. 

They laid violent hands, those old Reform- 
ers, on the shrines of beauty, and sometimes 
as one thinks of the German preachers droning 
away in their box-like pulpits, one wonders 


16 


anb ©ttjer Skctcljcs 


if it were worth the spent blood and trouble. 

William drew the sign of the cross on the 
graveled walk. “When you go to Padua, go 
and hear mass in the old cathedral there. 
Once in the night I heard sung there the mass 
for the dead. On the high altar twinkled in 
the dusk the ornaments of gold and silver, 
and as the choirboys chanted with their violin 
voices, the violet smoke of the incense rose in 
clouds, the flames of the candles flickered like 
the souls of the dead and of those who have 
come for them, and in the swinging lamps 
smouldered the scarlet and purple fire, like the 
tongues of love and passion. 

“ How subtle are the thoughts which, 
through this masque of beauty, steal for a 
moment with the beloved dead into the eternal 
shadow. And yet,” said William, looking at 
the ruined walls of the cloister, “ Italy sleeps. 
When you go to Eisenach you will see in a 
room in the Wart burg a blotch on the wall 
where Luther once fired his ink-bottle at 
the devil, and hit him, too. I’ll wager. So 
Germany swings the balance over Italy. Well, 
let us go back to the town. ’ ’ 


17 


Q Clfoptn nocturne 


We wandered back, and if we belonged any- 
where, it was in the sixteenth century ; but in 
the market-square we found again the nine- 
teenth, for it was market-day in Grimma, and 
buying and selling were going on briskly. The 
market-place was crowded with booths filled 
with vegetables, flowers, and fruit ; and the air 
sang with the mingled cackling and scream- 
ing of poultry and old women. 

Your flower-girl, who is usually sixty or 
seventy years old, bent half double, with a face 
like a withered turnip, is a subject difficult to 
romance over. She needs to be in perspective 
and a good deal of it; but the goose-girl, or 
goose-boy, or goose-human, whatever he be, 
rises to the pitch and fulfils expectancy every 
time. 

The hissing, fluttering flock are driven 
hither and yon, by, let us say, the goose- girl, 
who in the manipulations of a long whip 
contrives to fall into picturesque poses. 

See her now, hands on hips, chin in the air. 

“ Will you have a goose, ladies and gentle- 
men? Step up now and choose your goose 
and let the goose-girl show you a thing or two. ’ ’ 


18 


ant) ©tljer Sfectcljcs 


You point to the largest of the flock, a gray 
old goose with a Schopenhauer cast of coun- 
tenance. 

Now the goose-girl throws out like a flash 
her long whip, the lash curls about the neck 
of the goose philosopher, and in a second he is 
pulled to your feet ; and if your goose is not 
cooked he is on the way to it. 

We turned from the pictures of the market- 
place to wander through the narrow streets of 
the old town ; by a famous school for boys, by 
the ruins of the castle where we watched the 
sun setting behind the hills ; its light fell on 
the great curved stone gables and long narrow 
walled entrance with its crumbling pillars 
capped with gigantic balls of stone. Over the 
red sandstone bridge which spans the Mulde 
we wandered on, looking down on those great 
arches begun over two hundred years ago. 

The sunset falls on castle walls. 

As I listened to the current of the river, in 
my mind’s eye passed what quaint processions 
over this old bridge ! Bevies of pink-cheeked 
Saxon girls in wooden shoes and low-necked 
19 


C £ljoptn Zlocturne 


bodices, soldiers in gay uniforms with clank- 
ing swords, crowds of peasants, red-capped 
and rough-booted, bearing fuel, fruit, and 
vegetables to the portly burghers of the town. 

How the wheel and piston of your modern 
iron bridge beat on the ear, but soft as a dream 
passes through the mind this procession of 
olden days — like the figures on a Greek vase 
which have had perish away their time and 
place, and still live on, and will, so long as the 
heart loves beauty. 

* ♦ ♦ 

We have supper in an old inn with a tiny 
court and passageways paved with stone worn 
by the coming and going of many long years. 
The Golden Lion they call it, and here they 
serve you with wild strawberries with the flavor 
of the wood in them, and a champagne with as 
many sparkles as the paraphrases of Anacreon. 

Over these we linger as the shadows thicken 
on the deserted square and on the old steep- 
roofed houses with their peering dormer 
windows. 

How still it is ! 


20 


onb ©tljcr Sketcljes 


The only sign of life is a little yellow dog 
whose legs work in a ridiculous manner to 
carry him across the street to bark at a white 
cat sleeping peacefully under a door-knocker 
at least three hundred years old. 

And that old Rathskeller across the way, 
built in 1400, how many generations of yellow 
dogs has it seen and heard bark, and then sub- 
side into dust ! 

Over there where that blur of pale light 
shows on the horizon’s edge, there is a great 
city where men and women strain and sweat 
in the rush of life, but who could hurry under 
the gables of these old houses? 

Like a stone image of that old Rameses of 
Egypt who, with his mysterious smile, mocks 
the effervescent bubbles of the flying years, 
they make one no more than a pinch of dust — a 
pinch of dust tousled by every whiffet of a 
scolding wind. 

At just this point in my musing, an obse- 
quious waiter pushes his fiercely pointed 
mustache into the room. The carriage waits 
to take us to the station. 

“Is my hat on straight?” I question 


21 


Cl Cljopin Hocturne 


William, looking into his sad eyes. Is it the 
mystery of life or is it the champagne? We 
lift high our glasses and clash their rims 
together. “ To Time — Time, who like a big- 
bellied peasant drinks us down, glorious and 
ignoble together, like a brew of indifferent 
beer. ’ ’ 

In a moment we are in the carriage. The 
moon is over my right shoulder and behind us 
rises the castle roof against the evening sky. 

“ I’ve discovered something, ” William says 
suddenly, leaning toward me and gesturing 
behind the back of the innocent cabman. 
“It’s true about Katherine Van Bora,’’ he 
goes on, nodding mysteriously. 

“What’s true?’’ I query. “Why the 
legends about her escape,’’ he whispers. 
“ Well, I never doubted it.’’ “ Yes, it’s true,’’ 

he muses. 

“Let me see, it was some time in 1500. 
Well, this is the identical cab that carried her 
off.’’ I peer over the rickety wheels, “It 
does look rather ancient. ’ ’ 

“And the very horse,’’ he says enthusias- 
tically. 


22 


anb ©tljcr SRetcljes 


** There seems no doubt about the horse; it’s 
ribs are of a style of architecture dating back 
to the Gothic of the fifteenth century. ’ ’ 

When we drive up at a funereal pace in 
front of the station the dusk hides the long 
street leading into the town ; the crescent moon 
has risen higher in the pale sky, and over there 
where the castle roof shows dim in the dusk, 
we hear faint and low the horns of the regi- 
ment band. 



23 


Q Cljopin Hocturne 


A Day in the Harz Mountains 

In this air one sleeps like the dead, but the 
wind out of the pine forest blew across my face 
and I awakened. The barn is built on to the 
end of the house, and I heard the horse stamp- 
ing, the hens cackling, and knew I should soon 
get my breakfast, for these German hens lay 
fresh eggs for my breakfast every morning ! 

A little later Frau John came tapping at my 
door with my breakfast of omelette and cher- 
ries. Old, white-haired Frau John, whose 
children all sleep in the graveyard on the hill, 
and who never fails to present me at breakfast 
a nosegay of roses and mignonette. 

‘ ‘ Today is a good day to make the ascent, ’ ’ 
said old Frau John, speaking of the Brocken. 
“ ’Tis clear, and you can’t count on that every 
day. The Brocken is a soul with more tears 
than smiles. ” So it was settled. 

We drive away in the early morning, passing 


24 


anb ©tljer Skctcljcs 


an old girl yoked to her wooden pails. 
Tag^ calls she in her deep voice. Her 
stockingless feet are thrust into heelless slip- 
pers; there is nothing superfluous about her 
even in clothes. Nature’s conditions have 
peeled her down till there is not much left but 
kernel, and if this is a little bitter, it is not 
unwholesome. At first she seemed to me but 
a type of toil, but afterward she grew on me 
and I saw in her the shadow of a great force — 
the ascetic holding the balance against the 
world’s sensualism. 

“Adieu,” I call to her as she swings by, 
her wooden pails dangling at her sides. 
Gliick^ she shouts back, without turning her 
head a hairbreadth to stare after me. 

Five hours’ drive from the base to the brow 
of the Brocken, through beech wood and pine 
wood, where mountain streams leap from rock 
to rock, purple in the shadow, but silver and 
gold where they swirl in the open, and then 
up a steep rock-strewn ascent, and we are on 
the summit of the Brocken. 

Here on this airy perch we find ourselves 
isolated from the earth by a mist rising from 


26 


d Ctjopin ZTocturne 


the plain beneath. The view is gone ; there is 
nothing to be done but to take ourselves into 
the Brocken cafd and persuade ourselves we 
have driven up here for a glass of beer. Inside 
two or three hundred tourists are bent on the 
same persuasion. Near us a party of students 
with wreaths of leaves and wild flowers on 
their hats, hum softly Verlassen^ verlassen, 
staring at us with those transcendental Ger- 
man eyes in which poetic feeling and love of 
beer mingle together. The air is blue with 
the smoke from the men’s cigars; figures loom 
hazily through it like phantoms struggling in 
the mists. It is Faust’s Walpurgis night over 
again, and we hurry out, view with interest 
the hole in the ground where the devil is said 
to have sat down rather hard, and start on the 
homeward drive which takes us less than two 
hours. 

It has cleared when we drive into Ilsenberg, 
and the sun is going down behind the moun- 
tains against whose misty slopes shine warmly 
the clustering red-tiled roofs of the houses. A 
pleasant home-coming it is! On the long 
street the light flickers like a candle flame in 


26 


anb ©tljer Sketcljes 


the wind and then goes out. Down the road 
comes to meet us the shepherd with his flock 
and the sociable black -and- tan sheep dog, and 
farther on we greet the hay-women coming 
home in the twilight — bluff old spirits in short 
skirts, shapeless sacques, and bare legs, their 
heads bound up in red and yellow scarfs. The 
best of it is, they have such a devil-may-care 
air; a manner half satirical, half roystering 
camaraderie. It would seem that these old 
cronies having lived out with wind and weather 
and done a man’s work and woman’s too on 
this old earth, had learned a thing or two. I 
would give a good deal for the philosophy got 
by sixty or seventy years’ hay-raking. 

At supper when I tell Frau John of our lack 
of success, she shakes her head. ‘ ‘ Ah ! that 
Brocken, ’tis a tricky soul with more tears than 
smiles! ” 


* ♦ ♦ 

There is a little garden across the street 
from where I live, full of rose trees tied to 
poles topped with gilt and silver balls. 

At night the moon rises slowly over the 
27 


d Ctfopin Zlocturnc 


mountain and lights the village, the country 
road, and the pool in front of the hotel Forel- 
len, which reflects in its depths the trembling 
lights, and the rows of little dipt locust trees 
growing at its edge. 

Then it moves over the little garden where 
it shines down with soft light. Half asleep I 
lie in my bed, hearing, as in dreams, a girl’s 
thin voice singing to the tinkling notes of an 
old piano. Suddenly I tremblingly start up. 
What was that? It was a voice which sang 
like the moving darkness of the pine trees — 

Ich stand in dunkeln traiimen.* 

With sobbing breath I strive to utter the 
familiar words. 

A face starts out of the darkness, the eyes 
look into mine — those dark unfathomable eyes. 
I fall back on my pillow and press my hand 
over my heart, which seems falling to pieces. 

* From Heine’s Poem “ Her Portrait ” — 

I stand in darkest dreaming, 

And gaze her face upon, 

And on the beloved features 
The life begins to dawn. 

28 


anb ©tljer Sketcljes 


And still the voice rises from the little g^arden, 
where I seem to hear the rose leaves falling 
softly, softly on the grass. 

Und ach, ich kann es nicht glauben, 

Dass ich dich vcrloren hab\ 



And round her lips is growing 
A wondrous, wondrous smile, 
And as through tears of longing 
Sparkle her eyes the while. 

And my tears are flowing 
My cheeks forever down. 

And oh — I cannot believe it. 

My darling, that thou art gone ! 


29 


(X (Etjoptn nocturne 


Hildeshcim — Beneath the Gables of 
Olden Houses 

“ Let me for once in my life do a place in 
American style, ’ ’ I thought to myself, as I sent 
one porter after a cabman and another after a 
guide. And with these two natives I did Hil- 
desheim in four hours. 

It is true I was sick all the next day and at 
times could not remember whether I had been 
in Hildesheim or not, but I had the satisfaction 
of knowing that the Browns could never throw 
up to me again their feat of having done 
Florence while they waited over one train. 

When I had recovered enough to look over 
my mail, I thought the matter over, and 
decided that Hildesheim was as good a 
place as any, and so I stayed on a week 
longer. 

But after all it was those glimpses of the old 
place caught on the fly, that gave to the 


30 


anb ©tljer Sketches 


Hildesheim of memory its peculiar charm, like 
the city of a dream. 

Glimpses of old houses with bands of carv- 
ing, vivid with color, till one could imagine a 
mantle of rich embroidery had been hung 
there, streets garlanded with ropes of ever- 
green and bedizened with flags, for it was fete 
day, with here and there the red patch of a 
house-wall showing through the forest of little 
birch boughs which stood by every door, 
between every window, and hung from the 
eaves. What towers and old churches, and in 
the midst of all and over all, my guide and the 
driver standing up in the carriage, talking at 
once, while a procession of small boys followed 
gayly behind. 

At the first church there was the dearest old 
verger, who came clattering across the church- 
yard with the great iron keys in his hand. He 
chippered away with his two lone teeth and made 
me promise to come again if I stayed over, and 
I promised to do so if I lived. The next morn- 
ing I hurried around to that church early and 
the faithless old one had gone off to the fete. 
Such is man, early or late, they are all the same. 

31 


d Cljopin nocturne 


He showed me pillars eight hundred years 
old, which some Americans have taken casts 
of, which are now in the Boston Museum. Of 
course this made us brothers on the spot, and 
so when he confided to me that he had been 
showing the church to visitors for thirty years 
I said nothing, but I was skeptical ; he looked 
more to me as though he had been showing it 
for three hundred years. 

In the crypt of this old church are the bones 
of Bishop Bernward, its famous founder, but 
though I begged for that crypt he shook his 
head and the two lone teeth rattled sadly. 
“ He was so desolate that he could not show 
the crypt to the gracious lady;’* it belonged 
still to the Catholics, though the church had 
passed into the hands of the Protestants soon 
after the Reformation. 

The more I thought about it, the more I 
longed for that crypt. What to me was the 
Roman ceiling, what the angel choir, whose 
lacework of marble could not conceal those 
angelic forms, their faintly-tinted wings like the 
half unfurled leaf of the crocus, their upturned 
faces like rose leaves? O, sweet! But I was 


anb ©tijer SItetctjcs 


always thinking of the crypt and the bones in 
it, and I recalled bitterly a crypt at Lyons, 
France, and how by saying a prayer there, 
we had been absolved, by the Pope, of our sins 
for three hundred days. And the life after- 
wards, ah ! the life afterwards, and those three 
hundred days were past and gone. Nights in 
Florence when through the arches of Ponte 
Vecchio we talked with the east and west, or 
in the dusk of early morning hurrying home 
from some rout, saw the dawn touch to flame 
the marble of Angelo’s David, till rising out 
of the shadow it seemed to spring from its 
pedestal into the air. 

Days and nights of Venice, when we jostled 
Greek, Christian, and Jew on the Rialto, buy- 
ing their thick-skinned dates; and a little 
beyond, the “ Golden House ” rose from the 
water like a jeweled peacock’s feather; and 
beneath the shadow of the blue domes of San 
Marco the pigeons fluttered and cooed, as the 
corn was scattered on the pavement. 

Spring and summer days in Germany, Ach 
Gott, passed and gone, when we sat on the 
iron balcony high above the street, and saw the 


33 


O (Eljoptn Hoctume 


mist rising from the river, and talked Nietzche 
and Schopenhauer. Or at night, where 
the river flowed through the wood, heard the 
nightingale calling to her love; and the moon- 
light fell there soft as snow, save where the 
dark branches of the trees moved between. 

You will find at the end of the wood a little 
cafd where the German Frauen and Herren 
drink their beer, while the children tumble 
under the tables, the light from the coal-oil 
lamp falling on their ruddy faces and flaxen 
hair and the blue and gray beer-mugs on the 
wall. 

There is a man with a waxed mustache who 
plays on an old piano Ver/assen, verlassen^ 
and in his dark eyes, as I lean on the little 
round table, I see the Orient ; the great sweep 
of the Arabian desert lies there before me, 
smiling with its mystical white smile, the 
wind out of the starry sky is in my face, and 
we are flying. “And will the gracious lady 
see the altar built into the church in ‘One 
Thousand,’ and will the gracious lady see the 
carven Madonna, Saint Joseph, Saint John, 
and the iron candlesticks? ’’ 


34 


anb ©tljer Sftetcljes 


To all of this I shook my head sadly, pressed 
a coin into the hand of the ancient verger, and 
joined my guide, who for the moment had gone 
out of the guide business and reposed against 
the doorpost of a cafd near by, discussing a 
glass of beer with the driver. 

These two natives impressed me with awe 
by their manner of anticipating their wages. 
At every stopping-place they “took beer,” 
arranging a little loan with me on the strength 
of prospective fees — that friendly we had 
become ; I never met with two gentlemen of 
larger imagination ; there may have been caf^s 
in Hildesheim where we did not take beer, but 
I do not believe it. 

We drove to the Domhof which the guide- 
book states to be the birthplace of Hildesheim. 
This guide-book, by the way, written in 
English by a German, contains some jewels 
which reconciles one to the limits of one’s own 
speech. One would fain hear such forever. 

Speaking of the “ Guild Hall of the Butch- 
ers,” the poetic one writes: “The viewer 
leaves but hart this house who stands match- 
less. ’ ’ There a picture, and in a guide-book. 


35 


d Cljopin Ilocturnc 


and without preparation, before one has 
become what one might call “exposed” to 
this striking style, he proclaims in speaking of 
the restoration of a building. “ It must be 
praised that they are harty about to conserve 
this bright ornament to old Hildesheim and to 
save it to the furtherest times. ’ ’ And again 
he speaks in that delicious way of his, of a 
wind mill “ that as an ornament to the country 
is conserved to the town. ’ ’ 

Should you travel many a day and find 
at the end the Domhof square towers and 
peaked gables waiting you, you would swear 
it had been a short shrift for so quaint a 
shrine. 

Here in the consecrated inner Domhof is the 
one-thousand-year^old rose bush which has an 
authentic history of two hundred years. When 
one remembers some of the legends of 
Germany this, in itself, is a remarkable fact. 

But it is only unpoetic scientists who throw 
those two hundred years in your face ; the real 
lover of that rose bush will tell you that 
about the year 800, Ludwig hunting in the 
forests of Saxony, lost his way, and when 


36 


an{) ©tijcr Sketcljcs 


the night fell he hung his crucifix on a wild 
rose bush and lay down to sleep. There in a 
dream the Holy Virgin Maria appeared unto 
him, and in commemoration of this visit of the 
Virgin, by the rose bush, the Domhof sprang 
up ; and this is the same rose tree, and inside 
in the Domhof treasure-trove is that same 
crucifix. Who would not believe this quaint 
legend against a time-serving botanist? 

A wealth of adornment. Gothic and Italian 
Renaissance, carven tomb, sculptured madon- 
na, font and carven screen, gilt and bronze 
hanging lamps, jeweled reliquaries — all these 
delicately wrought gifts the workers of a past 
time have bequeathed to linger here in the 
shadow of the Domhof rooftree. 

And how they wrought, those old artisans, 
beneath the carven gables of Hildesheim ! And 
they are dust now, and yet as one lingers here 
in the dusk, dreaming, out of their graves they 
seem to reach their long fingers to hold one 
captive, while through the aisles steals like 
incense the faint odor of old shrouds, where 
have fallen rose leaves crumbling with the 
mortal dust, or scent of autumn herbs, whose 


37 


Cl Cljopirt nocturne 


Spice one treads out, trampling unknowingly 
on a grave hid in the long grass. 

Through a low archway we followed the 
verger into the courtyard where the one-thou- 
sand-year-old rose bush shows its great 
branches on the walls. 

Here are the cloisters surrounded by a beau- 
tiful arcade, with delicately carved Roman 
archways ; within is the graveyard whose low 
crosses are covered with moss. How peaceful 
sleeps moonlight and sunlight on those myrtle- 
covered graves! and softly it falls too, through 
the low archways on the stone pavements, 
where long ago priest and monk murmured 
their prayers, with a little sniff for the fragrant 
roses in the grass below, or mayhap a peep at 
the stars, or a shivering glance at the shadows 
of the crosses on the path beneath ; and follow- 
ing the footsteps of the old monks, we lingered 
by the door of the Anna Kapelle, seeing 
through half-shut eyes its glittering crucifix 
and the dragon gargoyles springing out into 
the air above the graves in the grass. 

We knelt on the stone floor; someone kept 
whispering, Jesu Christie Jesu Christie and the 


38 


anb ©tl^er Sfectcljes 


light fell through the stained -glass windows 
on the faded altar cloth, and outside the 
pigeons cooed and plumed themselves on the 
red- tiled roofs. 

Who would not linger in such a place? But 
the world of Hildesheim waited outside, and 
so away we drove, through old archways, 
down narrow streets scarcely wide enough for 
our carriage, by old carven houses over whose 
doorways was written many a name famous in 
Hildesheim history. Ah! those houses, tiny, 
some of them, and carven and stained, with 
scroll and wreathe and arabesque, and knight 
and ladie and child, all dreadfully fat — the 
medieval German was fat, I am convinced 
of it. 

It made one quite mad to see people in 
modern clothes wandering beneath those 
gables; only Faust and Mephisto should have 
been there, the light slanting on Mephisto’ s 
thin brown cheek and on the scarlet feather in 
his cap. 

Through those low doors and archways one 
creeps into the heart of medieval Germany; 
the birch boughs by door and window are the 


39 


CJ (El^opin nocturne 


survival of a medieval custom making the old 
buildings keep festival in riotous hilarity. So 
it is the world over, till to the subtle mind 
there is no youth nor age ; life is seen in differ- 
ent stages of festival, labor or quiescence, 
that is all. 


* * * 

At the hospital, where there is a maiden 
who does not understand German even when 
it is spoken in Mr. Otto’s best manner (such is 
the stupidity of the natives in not understand- 
ing their own language), I dismissed my guide 
and driver, and peering through doorways into 
workshop and wine-cellar, I wandered back to 
the market-place. 

Here I sat down to rest by an old fountain. 
Around this market-square are grouped some 
of the most picturesque houses in Germany — 
Knochenhauer, Amthaus, Wedekind, Rath- 
haus, and all the rest. 

As the dusk deepened, stealing away the 
richness of their ornamentation, but not the 
picturesqueness of their outlines against the 
sky, it seemed to me they leaned toward each 


40 


anb ©tljcr Skctcljes 


other, whispering together. And the foun- 
tain, in voices no darkness could quench, called 
to me of old workers, dead and gone, who 
wrought with a sincere vigor which perpetu- 
ated even ugliness. 

In the shadow of a doorway a soldier caught 
a bare-necked girl by the arm and kissed her 
warmly ; she put up her plump hand over her 
laughing mouth. Ah ! my doves, the shadows 
under the doorway of the haus Wedekind were 
not so deep as you dreamed. 

* * * 

Some night I would like to steal back there 
when all is still, save the trickle of the water 
in the basin of the fountain, and hear those old 
houses talk together. 

Many a year have the old cronies stood 
shoulder to shoulder around the market- 
square, and strange stories they might tell of 
olden days and customs; of men and women 
dead and gone, their craft and cunning linger- 
ing on in faded ornaments, “ like a tale that is 
told,” or rather like an old picture all of 
whose tints time has mellowed. For us those 


41 


d Cljoptn Hocturne 


days spell ‘ * romance. ’ ’ They had their guilds, 
their singing societies, their workers’ clubs; 
in many a tiny workshop wrought not artisan 
but artist. And they loved, back there in the 
youth of that old place, for they had red blood 
in their veins; and they hated too, and fought 
and worked and renounced in tears no eyes 
saw. 

Ah ! you might hear a tale worth the telling 
and hearkening to. 

♦ * * 

As I went down the dusky street to my 
hotel, a sentence from the guide-book came 
into my mind. 

“ Everywhere and at all times in Hildesheim, 
the right noble fashion is kept ; with that suits 
the liberality that is done in a high degree to 
all distressed. ’ ’ 

Happy Hildesheim, so may it ever be, 
beneath the carven gables of thy rooftrees ! 


anb 0tljer Sketctjes 


On the Hills of Weimar 

We slowly climbed the hill, the Russian lady 
and I. It was the fifth day of April and just 
four o’clock. A violet mist veiled the sun, and 
though the air was still the ground seemed to 
beat like a heart with life. No bird was 
visible, yet the air was full of bird trilling. 
It was as though the brown earth, turned over 
for the sowing, was singing. 

Halfway up the hill five people were break- 
ing the soil. 

There was an old man who never straight- 
ened up; like those trees whose branches 
sometimes take root in the earth. He had on 
a ragged brown coat and below this hung a 
purple woolen shirt. Near him stood a small 
boy, who raised his hoe with a desultory 
movement, waving his head from side to side, 
as though his life had been drawn out of him 
and he was following with an inner gaze its 
movements through the air. 


43 


Q (Eljopin nocturne 


A peasant woman with large hands and feet 
stood next to him, a yellow scarf bound over 
her head. The meek and patient pose of her 
whole body as she leaned on her hoe touched 
the heart. So Millet would have painted her. 

Beyond her was a young couple, a man and 
a girl staring listlessly into the air with vague 
glances. She, like the boy, seemed to feel the 
vague wonder of something which had loos- 
ened itself out of her and escaped from the 
life of the soil into the air. The young man 
worked industriously ; but he too seemed con- 
scious of something of himself freed, but 
gone — whither? He looked from time to time 
at the girl as though in her might be found 
the answer, but she with her dull pathetic eyes 
stared still vaguely up into the sky. As we 
passed them the vivid color of their garments, 
the pose of their leaning figures was caught 
against the deep violet of the sky. They 
might have been a fresco of toil : beings born 
out of the earth and ever returning to it, bear- 
ing on their faces and bodies the signs of their 
brotherhood with it; the different angles of 
their bent figures expressing the different 
44 


attb ©ttjcr Sketctjes 


stages of the accomplishment of their destiny. 

There were three children walking against 
the sky on the far side of the hill. They 
moved there like dark leaning figures cut out 
of cardboard. In the distance their stick-like 
legs and arms moved about with a curiously 
mechanical motion. We heard the softened 
murmur of their laughter, scarcely connecting 
it with those silhouettes on the distant horizon. 
That strange blotting out which distance does, 
had rubbed them into the earth and sky as a 
mere part of it. The landscape had drunk 
them up as though they were flies. We walked 
slowly over the brow of the hill, passing the 
fields ploughed up for the sowing. The brown 
dirt seemed to possess the five senses — it 
asked for the recognition of brotherhood. 

* ♦ * 

And over all a deep quiet — the calm, the 
quiescence of the great mother before the 
birth of a new life from out her. 

We were silent for a while, but as the 
shadows darkened we began speaking softly 
together. We talked of people who had lived 


45 


Q Cljoptn nocturne 


with tragic simplicity the pure logic of their 
own natures ; of developments in human 
affairs as simply true as the natural life out of 
doors; of Nietzche, the philosopher, who now 
imbecile lived on the other side of the hill; 
of elemental natures whose fires no custom 
could quench, the sequences of whose catas- 
trophes followed each other as irrevocably as 
the succession of the seasons; of the justifi- 
cation of the crimes of great revenges. 

Our somber stories fitted the sadness of the 
gathering darkness. We turned toward the 
lights of the town with a feeling of relief. 

Night covered the great hills, as the distance 
had drunk up the lonely ones toiling on their 
slopes. 



46 


anb ©tijcr Sfcetctjcs 


Jena 

In my memory remains a picture of a group 
of girls shivering in the early dawn in an old 
garden. That garden is in Jena and there the 
shadowy trees, sighing as in some sad Grego- 
rian chant, lament their lost poet, the too swift- 
passing Schiller. 

Ten figures oblique against the wind, like 
the rigid outlines on an Egyptian frieze, stole 
down the dark streets — the German governess 
at the head with her umbrella, I in the middle, 
and the lover of the English governess at a 
respectful distance in the rear. 

The sun had raised its disc above the edge 
of the hills, when we found ourselves in a nar- 
row street before a group of old buildings. 
There once lived the early professors of the 
old university. 

Ah! there were types! Old Mathias Flacias, 
who quarreled with a brother professor all his 


47 


Q Cljoptn nocturne 


life long on theological questions. In church 
and out of church they hurled denunciations at 
each other; and their houses being separated 
by only a narrow passageway, they shouted 
across from their windows, affording to the 
simple folks about an edifying example of the 
influence on the human passions of a thorough 
searching of Holy Writ. Mathias’s name was 
Fletz, which he had changed to the Latin as 
was customary in those days. 

On one occasion his opponent, — whose name 
I have forgotten, he having gone down in 
history as the maker of a phrase, and that an 
opprobrious one, rather than as the discoverer 
of any law in theology, — leaning far out of his 
window, this learned man shook his fist in a 
manner that did full justice to his theological 
training, and bellowed out that his brother 
professor was ein grober Fletz — groher mean- 
ing uncouth and ruffianly; and to this day 
that name is tossed about Germany, a term 
of derision. All of which goes to show that 
those people who claim theological discussions 
have no real bearing on ordinary life, are 
without a proper knowledge of history. I 


48 


anb ©tijcr Sketcljes 


think, nay I will wager, that Mathias and his 
brother professor were, deep down in their 
hearts, fond of each other. Let us hope they 
died on the same day, for think how lonely the 
one left would be. No voice bellowing across 
the street; no whacking and laying on of 
ecclesiastical knockdowns in the market-place 
while the wondering townspeople stood gaping 
open-mouthed at such a display of mental 
sinew; and looking down on them from his 
own adventurous day, clad in complete armor, 
stood the statue of the stout elector. In a 
very truculent attitude he stood, the open Bible 
in one hand and a long unsheathed sword in 
the other, as much as to say that the Christian 
precept of love to one another was the only 
true religion, which he had come into the 
world especially to enforce, and to enforce at 
the tip end of a very sharp sword, too. 

I love those old days and their mighty, 
quarrelsome men. There was the stout 
elector, old Johann Freidrich. Fat as he was, 
Johann Freidrich had a most romantic time of 
it. At the battle of Muhlberg he was taken 
prisoner by Charles V. Though wounded he 


49 


d Cljoptn Hoctumc 


might have escaped had his horse been able to 
carry his immense weight. Ten weary years 
was he an exile from home, Lucas Cranich, 
the painter, accompanying him in exile, for he 
was his friend. 

But the long years, as slow as rose and set 
the sun on lonely days and nights, passed 
away, and home comes the doughty knight, 
his wife and children coming out to meet him, 
and a tower is still standing on one of the hills 
where the meeting took place. I wonder what 
they said — not much, I imagine. He looked 
into her face on which years of waiting must 
have cut some anxious lines, and in that smile 
illumining the faded countenance was there 
not something heartbreaking? 

Perhaps he noticed some detail of her dress, 
some little pains she had taken to still look fair 
in his dear eyes. And she, scanning over the 
beloved face, to draw from thence the consola- 
tion that the years had not bereft her of him, 
all tremulously read each little sign by which 
she made him still her own. 

What could he do after all these years but 
fold her in his arms? 

50 


onb ©tljer Sfectcljcs 


Home came these two arm in arm, their 
children by their side. 

Jena must have looked beautiful to Johann 
Freidrich’s eyes. There below him the red- 
tiled roofs shone in the fading light, the old 
church with its great tower and shrined 
madonna. And there the river mirrored the 
setting sun as placid as though there were no 
meetings or partings on this earth; for you 
may sigh enough into it to put out a furnace 
fire, but you shall not darken its glassy smile. 
Your river has a disdain for men and affairs. 
It allows not itself to be disturbed. You may 
neighbor with a tree, plant your hill with a 
vineyard, and frolic with it at sunrise and in 
the purple evening, but your river keeps 
the antique repose of those gods who from 
Olympia deigned not to stoop to quarrel with 
the smiles and tears of men. 

So lovely Jena in that soft light touched 
Johann Freidrich after years of separation 
with a power to fire his spirit, and he then 
and there vowed Jena a university, keeping his 
word, as I’ll warrant he made other people keep 
theirs, from the way he takes hold of his sword. 


51 


Cl (Eljopitt Hocturne 


How full Jena is of memories! Its dark 
narrow streets seem like the naked bed of a 
river where has once run a stream calling 
from some lofty height. 

Here Schiller wrote Walletistein; here is the 
bare wooden house he lived in while he tried, 
on a starvation salary, to support a family and 
pay off debts accumulated while in school. 
And in the midst of his duties, as father, bread- 
winner, professor of history, and helper to his 
mother, — for he was ever a dutiful son, — he 
found time to write Wallenstein. It is this 
world pressure of poverty and work and 
trouble battling against us, that gives the 
human granite its scarlet and purple veinule — 
the royal colors of suffering. 

* * ♦ 

The sun reached meridian, and on Jena’s 
medievally narrow streets and dark archways 
it shone down with hospitable warmth. The 
whole morning yawning in the face of the old 
streets, even as they told their story, we rose 
now to a momentary enthusiasm ’neath this 


52 


anb 0tljcr Sfeetcljes 


epic of the sun and fastened our eyes on the 
heights above the town. 

On one of those hills sang once the guns of 
Napoleon their song of death to the Prussians 
drawn up in the valley below. What a music 
calls from these fields of Europe! Nor has 
the last note sounded. One shall hear again 
those strange wild chords announcing the 
beginning of a colossal agony. 

Even the old church has its storm epoch, 
for see — all the shrines hollowed from its 
outer walls are empty now, save one at the 
end which shrines still its snub-nosed ma- 
donna. With the peculiar Gothicky leer of 
the fifteenth century she looks down from 
her ancient perch on the passer-by. 

Her companions, — 1 wonder if she misses 
them, — during one of those spasms of rage 
which took possession of the Protestants in the 
early days of the Reformation, went the way of 
many a good old saint of stone. When Luther 
heard of it he left the Wart burg, where he was 
translating the Bible, and hastening into Jena, 
dispersed the iconoclasts, and so our madonna 
was saved. 


53 


Cl (Eljopin nocturne 


Against the background of devil legends 
which sprang up in those days, when men 
battling against each other seemed less human 
than demon, is etched many times the bulk of 
Luther. He was a good figure, but this inci- 
dent is like a jet of light in the face of the real 
man. Only your builder shall tear down. He 
knows what to spare to build into the new, 
what is rubbish and what building-stone ; but 
for those empty shrines, ’twas a pity. One 
could not but furnish them anew with wall- 
eyed meaching saints standing stiffly there 
in their niches, while sun and rain and snow 
beat on Jena’s streets, and lover and maid and 
soldier and artisan passed by, intent on the 
passion of their hour ere they returned to the 
dust which in the end these saints of stone, 
crumbling through the long years in their 
niches, mingled with at last. 

% * ♦ 

To get to the height we passed the old club- 
house of the university. We had heard the 
story that the students always sat outside the 
doorway on summer days drinking their beer. 


54 


an^ 0tfjer SItetcljcs 


and that they had not failed once in the last 
three hundred years in saluting out-of-town 
maidens with fervid love-songs. 

It is true there was another way to the hill 
that was a little nearer, but we did not intend 
to be driven an inch out of our way by the 
creatures, so we went round their way. The 
moment we appeared, sure enough it was, 
“ My darling, my sweetheart, and my love ** — 
at least I was told so, for I disdained to notice 
the creatures. But as there was a picture in a 
window opposite the club-house, and as I was 
stopping there to look at it, I happened to 
glance their way, and every man of them had 
his hand on his heart, and with the most 
fervid glances smiled and threw kisses, till 
through horror I was rooted to the spot, and 
when I looked around all the others were 
rooted to the spot too, and there we stood till 
Fraulein Minna came up and drove us on with 
her umbrella. 

Such delicious abandon to a love passage 
only the German student is capable of. In 
dreams I still see them — pink cheeks, little 
white caps, and spectacled blue eyes. 


66 


Ct Cljopin nocturne 


You climb three hundred steps and then you 
climb some more, and the summit of the hill 
is yours. Below you are the red-tiled roofs of 
Jena, the river, the garden called Paradise, 
with hills rising one beyond the other, blue 
and bluer till their lines melt in the violet sky. 

The little cafd where we had coffee stands 
on the very spot where once sang the guns of 
Napoleon. There is some satire in this story 
bleak with tragedy. For the Prussians had 
not expected the arrival of Napoleon for 
several days, as the path over the mountain 
was known only to the Germans themselves. 
Little anxiety was felt ; the people went about 
their usual work ; but that dull roar, what was 
it? They looked up, and above them on the 
height was planted the cannon of Napoleon. 
A German had been found who for love of life 
gave the fire into the enemy’s hand. How 
would one like to have been inside of that 
man as, most honorably attended by a French 
officer, he showed in the night the enemy along 
the secret path. 

And a little later had you been there you 
would have seen the German peasants lashing 


56 


anb ©tljcr Sbetcljes 


their straining oxen and horses, burdened with 
the French cannon, up the steep mountain side 
to rain down fire and death on their home and 
kinsfolk. 

Are not these two worthy jests to credit to 
the great Napoleon? One laughs through 
tears of blood, for out there in the valley men 
lie with their heads shattered, their blood 
spilling out into the dirt, and not far away in a 
little cottage of clay and boards some humble 
creature with her children catching at her 
dress is praying with anxious heart that he 
who lies out there may soon return to his 
fireside. 

Well, the world knows that Napoleon jested 
with big guns and he had the laugh on the 
world, till one day the Russian winds and cold 
and snow got the laugh on him, and then we 
hear of these same peasants feeding the 
wretched French soldiers on that awful, that 
wild march back to France. 

So they played their part, peasant and em- 
peror, soldier and shop-keeper, and the women 
in cottage and mansion who bore their children, 
spun for them, baked for them, laughed and 


57 


(X Cljopin Hoctume 


wept for them. And what was it all for, and 
who cares? Was there a hand using these 
creatures? Their petty fears and ambitions, 
were these but tools through which they were 
taken hold of and a fragment of some design 
wrought out? And for them was never given 
to know for what they worked nor why. 

Assuredly there is some hidden good in all 
this mystery. Destiny, which imprisons us, 
still lets fall through its closed shutters some 
little light. We see those who have been, 
and a glimpse comes of those who shall be — 
and we are linked with them. Time has 
moved on millions of ages to give us a place. 
There is a hand which pulls the wires, we 
perform our tricks and the curtain drops. 

% « ♦ 

We look down and see that the lamps begpn 
to twinkle along the streets, and they glimmer 
too on the dark gallows hill above the town 
where a hundred years ago they led out Jena’s 
condemned to die, and on the Garden of Para- 
dise falling asleep in the dusk. Sleeping too 
is that little garden where once Goethe and 


58 


anl» ©tljcr SRctctjcs 


Schiller walked and talked. The light is gone. 
One can no longer see the beautiful bust of 
Schiller beneath the trees, nor read Goethe’s 
inscription on the stone beneath — “ Here we 
have walked together and many great and 
beautiful words have spoken. ’ ’ 



69 


Q (Eljoptn nocturne 


Padua 

I can never forget Padua, probably because 
when there I did not see it. We had traveled 
all the morning, passing through fields green 
with the warm moisture of spring. Along 
their edges were rows of small trees, with 
grape-vines trained to them and hanging in 
festoons like a Pompeian frieze. How blue 
the sky was that day ! The whitewashed 
cottages of the peasants gleamed dazzling 
white against it. Out of the moss on their 
steep roofs, violets and white anemones were 
growing. I remember there was a little canal 
running through the fields, bordered by young 
willows and little silver birch trees. Its waters 
were so still, glazed like the eyes of a sleeping 
child to whom has come no thought of death 
or dream of love. 

Beyond the meadows I saw a tower and a 
silver dome, like the inverted cup of a lily. 


60 


anb ©ttjcr Skctcljes 


floating in the blue of the sky. It was Padua. 
We drew into the station. It was a hot sun- 
shiny afternoon about two o’clock; no one got 
out of the train and no one got in. The station 
was deserted. In the stillness we could hear 
the flies buzzing against the windows of our 
compartment. A little German Jew slept in 
one corner with a sandwich of black bread in 
his hand. Two American girls spoke drowsily 
of having “ done ” Florence in two days, and 
then overcome with the heat fell back dozing 
in their seats. 

I opened the door, and slipping out I walked 
to the end of the platform. The station, the 
fields, the white houses, all slept in the hot 
sunshine. There was no sign of life — only 
the sound of the buzzing of the flies against 
the windows of the station. 

I walked on until I came to a long street that 
lay, white with dust and quite still in the 
sunshine. Bordering it on each side were 
rows of dusty poplar trees. 

Away beyond there might have been steep 
roofs and domes. I thought I saw the gleam- 
ing of their walls, and again I thought it but a 


61 


(3 dljoptn Hoctume 


delusion of the sunlig^ht. I rubbed my eyes. 
It seemed to me like the street that leads into 
the City of Sleep. 

Once, in a dream, I had seen just such a long 
white street — and yet it was not the same; I 
looked vaguely about to find something miss- 
ing, and when I found it, it came over me like 
something long since familiar, but slipped a 
moment from the mind. 

* ♦ * 

What I see is a young girl standing at one 
side of the road under a poplar tree. She has 
just taken from her head a great bundle of 
brush. It lies at the side of the road. She 
leans listlessly against the trunk of a tree. 
Her bare feet are gray with dust. Her short 
cotton skirt shows her legs and ankles, the 
strong ankles of one who will carry burdens to 
the grave. She has on a yellow-and-blue apron 
and around her neck is a magenta colored 
handkerchief. Her face is brown as dirt; her 
large eyes look into mine, mutely questioning. 
About her is the absolute repose of the toiler 
at rest. Inert and passive she leans there, 


62 


anl) ©tijer Sftetcljes 


the cords of her young neck standing out in 
the strong light like the strings of a violin. 

My thoughts swing backward and forward. 
Padua is forgotten for I am in a little chamber 
beyond the sea. How sweet rises to me the 
breath of the syringa blossoms outside the 
window ! 

Still in the night lies the village street climb- 
ing slowly the hill, and the moon is shining 
there and shining down on the grassy graves, 
and I am dreaming, dreaming of a white street 
with the flash of a dome in the distance 
against a sky, blue as are only the skies of 
dreams. 

There is a girl standing by the side of the 

road. . . . 


♦ ♦ ♦ 

The learned doctors of Padua sleep, and 
sleeping too are its white streets. 

Still the girl stands there looking into space 
with mutely questioning eyes. 

I give one backward glance. The girl’s face 
looks at me with mysterious meaning — the 
meaning of that mystery which is the arrest of 


63 


d Cljopin Hocturnc 

the hidden permanence in the vanishing and 
disappearing. 

I go back and creep softly into my compart- 
ment. Quite still is the station — there is only 
the sound of the flies buzzing against the 
windows. 



64 


anb 0tljer Sketcljes 


Utrecht 

On my way to Rotterdam I found I must 
wait over an hour at Utrecht. The station 
faces the town with a terrace of shallow marble 
steps and out here at a little table I had lunch. 

It was a perfect night. One heard faintly 
the kling-klang of the horse- cars, and over the 
tree tops rose the cathedral tower. A full 
moon shone in the sky and the night air was 
fragrant with the blossoms of the linden trees. 

Next to me an artist sketched the cathedral 
tower; beyond him was an old man reading a 
book. 

Never did there exist, I decided as I looked 
him over, a more perfect Old-Dutch type. He 
might have been painted by Jan Steen him- 
self. He had on a curious top-hat and a wide- 
skirted coat that flared out from the waist. His 
face was bronzed and he had those uncanny 
leering eyes the Dutch painters have transfixed 


65 


Cl Cljopin Hoctume 


to canvas to unpleasantly haunt our dreams 
when we have eaten a late supper. 

What a fine old type, I thought, and got out 
my note-book. 

At that moment he spoke up. “ It’s going 
to be a fine day tomorrow, ’ * he said in excel- 
lent English. 

On closer scrutiny the book he was reading 
turned out to be Baedeker. I went over to 
borrow it and found they were two English- 
men out for a holiday. 

The artist spoke enthusiastically of Utrecht. 

“ Stay here by all means, there’s a good 
deal to be seen. Don’t go to Rotterdam, it’s 
dull.” 

And so I stayed. 

♦ * * 

Utrecht, one of the oldest towns of the 
Netherlands, dates back to the beginning of 
the Christian era; so the guide-book says, and 
where the guide-book’s statements are on the 
side of the picturesque I stand by the guide- 
book. 

The guide-book also says it is situated on the 


66 


aitb ©tl;er Sfeetctjes 


rivers Vecht and Oude, and this I verified, for 
I went out myself and looked up these two 
streams. 

Its canals and streams sleep beneath a forest 
of old trees, and walking there in the early 
morning one may meet old citizens in knee- 
breeches set off with silver buckles. With the 
manner of French courtiers they promenade 
there, with peasants in wooden shoes, barge- 
men with gold hoops in their ears, and old 
dames in snowy caps. 

The cathedral with its crumbling Gothic 
arches is picturesque and beautiful, but the 
interior has been spoiled. One has some ten- 
der fancies for the early structure before alien 
ideas had crept in to modify the quaint Dutch 
“plainness,” but it has been destroyed and 
rebuilt and restored until nothing remains of 
the original. 

The tower stands alone, there being a pas- 
sageway through it for the horse-cars. 

Long ago the tower was left standing alone 
by a terrible storm, which destroyed the rest 
of the cathedral ; two hundred and fifty years 
ago, I believe, though I am not certain. The 


67 


Cl Cljopin Hocturne 


guide-book is a little misty on this point, but 
anyhow there stands the gray tower looking 
down on the horse-car and the modern innova- 
tions of Utrecht with the air of one who knows 
that these, too, are but transitions, a move- 
ment of that tide which leaves here and there 
a crumbling stone to tell of the ebb and flood 
of the years. 

One can go up into the tower, but I was 
wise and did not. Instead I took the steam- 
boat and went to Maarsen, a crowd of small 
boys in wooden shoes gathering to see me off. 
These shoes with their slightly turned up toes 
became the young Hollanders’ lack of beauty 
immensely, and I noticed as these younglings 
reposed in pastoral ease on the bank that the 
soles of several of them sadly needed repair- 
ing. 

Our captain was adorned with an enormous 
gold hoop in one ear and oily yellow curls 
which fell to his shoulders. It is true he was 
otherwise garbed, but it was in the mediocre 
fashion of modern custom and aroused no 
interest. On his steamboat he serves one 
with first and second class ; first class you sit 
68 


anb ®tljcr Sfectcljes 


on a leather cushion ten inches square, and 
second class — you don’t. 

Meadows and meadows, and black and white 
cattle asleep under the trees, with an occa- 
sional cottage crouching on the edge of a little 
canal whose waters are green with age, an 
endless procession — this scene passed us till 
we came to Maarsen. 

Maarsen, I am convinced, is the most unin- 
teresting village of all Europe. I am willing 
to offer a prize for a more uninteresting 
village, but in my belief Maarsen heads the 
list. 

There is a garden off one side of the village, 
and I wandered over there for some tea. I 
made the waiter understand that I wanted tea, 
but when it came to cake, that was a different 
matter. I tried him in French, I tried him in 
German, I tried him in Italian, and had I 
known Hebrew I should have tried him in 
that. For the first time in my life I regretted 
not having learned Hebrew. At last that waiter 
had an inspiration ; with an air of triumph he 
drew out a pencil and paper. I also was jubi- 
lant. In my best manner I sketched a beautiful 


69 


Ct £l?optn Hoctume 


cake with icing on it. He smiled, bowed, 
went off gayly, and in about fifteen minutes 
returned with an omelette. 

I wandered back to the boat- landing to find 
that I was an hour and a half too early. 

An old man who was washing out a whole 
shopful of bottles, called me gracious lady in 
German and invited me to sit down on a bench 
by the shopdoor; and I did so, wondering as 
I watched the old Hollander splashing about 
with his stone bottles if he intended to drain 
the canal. 

The water was fetched for him by a boy who 
carried it in two pails slung to a wooden yoke 
he carried on his shoulders. In Ilsenburg in 
the Harz they still carry water in this primi- 
tive way, and I remember one old girl who 
used to go by every morning yoked to her 
pails who never failed to call out to me in her 
deep voice. Tag. 

The bench was in the sun and I felt myself 
overcome with drowsiness. The splashing of 
water on the stone bottles sounded farther 
away. I must have dozed, for it seemed to me 
I was wandering once more through the beech 


70 


anb 0tl|er SHetcIjes 


woods of Ilsenburg, listening to the wind sing- 
ing through the lonely aisles. Into the depth 
I wandered and heard no sound save the whis- 
pering of the trembling leaves. As it grew 
darker a laugh seemed to spring out of the 
dusk, and though on the open no sunlight 
shone, within a green mist-like light gleamed 
from the trees themselves, as though they 
were lighted with innumerable misty eyes. 
The tree trunks darkened into violet, the leafy 
boughs faded into twilightish vapor and strange 
shadows waved across the stagnant pools. Then 
the wood gave out one long, sighing, tremu- 
lous tone ; the sadness of the shadow of night 
which had drawn all into the common pitch. 

Yes, I must have dozed, for I was awakened 
by the old Hollander who touched my hand 
with his wet fingers. “ Gracious lady, the 
steamboat for Utrecht is at the landing. ’ ' I 
thrust a copper into his hand and hurried away, 
the boy with the wooden pails dangling against 
his legs watching me out of sight. 

I wonder if my old man still washes his 
stone bottles in the Dutch village of Maarsen. 

I had dinner in the garden and a little 


71 


Ct (Eljoptn ITocturne 


later I slowly wandered over to the Maliebaan. 

In the unlit shadowy spaces beneath the 
old trees promenaded lovers with their arms 
intertwined, gayly-dressed children, peasants 
in wooden shoes, stout citizens and bare-armed 
old women in snowy caps and the gold head- 
pieces of the Friesians. In that illusory 
atmosphere of the hour after sunset, what a 
picture made those quaint costumes under the 
fragrant antique trees ! The foreground was 
golden and the figures moving there were for 
an instant soaked in orange light, then the 
shadowy perspective drank them up — shadowy 
save where shot through with vivid color as a 
gay figure flared out to vanish the next instant 
into the dusk. 

“ All the world’s a stage,” and these shift- 
ing scenes, an instant caught on that delicate 
film behind the eye, shall remain when the 
fantasy of the moment is acted out. 

The scene and actors may vanish but the 
picture remains, of this one and that one in 
gay apparel, with fresh and joyous mien, when 
the rich clothes have been doffed and laid 
away in drawers and the faces sharpened by 


72 


anJ) ®tljcr Sfectcljes 


life’s stress and woe, or even fallen to dnst. 
Upon how many a flitting eye the picture 
falls ! And as for me, how many images of me 
are hidden away in far-off consciousness which 
Death shall crack and erase as he turns the 
light out on that stage where for an instant, 
oblivious of myself, I have played some mo- 
mentary part ! “It were too curiously to 
consider ; ’ ’ but the day was waning. I saw 
the lights of the Kirmess and went home by 
booths blazing with lamps and beating with 
the noise of horns and drums. Before their 
doors dancers and jugglers in tinseled gauze 
and pink tights invited one to enter with 
smiling painted lips. 

Before one booth an athlete in pink tights, 
which in the dim light made his great figure 
look stript naked, stood with one mighty arm 
folded over his breast; the other, but a with- 
ered stump, dangled from his shoulder. As 
his melancholy eyes looked down on the 
moving faces he seemed like a maimed lion, 
half dying yet unconquered. 

The crowd thickened ; the merry-go-rounds 
flew faster; the colors of this kaleidoscope 


73 


a Cljopttt ZToctume 


moved endlessly back and forth. Flying 
circles of blazing color, pierced through with 
screams of laughter, whirling faces, streaming 
hair and ribbons, mixed up with snatches of 
barbaric music — this is the picture in my mind 
of Utrecht’s Kirmess; this, and the face of a 
huge Hollander with cold eyes who followed 
me stealthily from booth to booth. I became 
uneasy, it was only a quick flight over a bridge, 
down a narrow street, and I was on the lighted 
avenue; the next instant I was safe in my 
room in the hotel. 

I did not sleep that night in Utrecht. All 
night long I heard the cathedral chimes play- 
ing. those bells of bronze and silver and gold ; 
in the still of the night they played on, and I 
lying in my bed thought of the long dusky 
Maliebaan, and how beneath its shadowy arches 
the night winds moved the perfumed branches, 
and the dust of fragrant flowers fell there, 
lightly, all the night long. 

And the canals, I saw them sleeping in the 
moonlight, and I was wandering there where 
silent, with their colored lamps darkened, lay 
many a dark barge. 


74 


anb ©tijer Stietcljes 


Within them slept, too, an invisible life. 
Bronzed men with their great arms flung over 
their heads, their bearded lips half open ; tired 
women with tangled hair and bent shoulders ; 
children with gay quilts thrown over their 
dimpled limbs. 

The waters of the canal slept so still in the 
moonlight ; under the arches of their bridges, 
under carved gables of old houses, and where 
the trees hang over their edges. 

By flower farms whose brilliant colors waited 
for the dawn to call them to life. 

And like a flower, with all the colors of your 
dreams sleeping in your folded soul, so you, 
wrapt in night, slept till the dark rim of the 
earth goblet had drunk up the Pleiades, and 
Venus and the dawn rose on the east; the 
barges woke to life, the carts rattled over the 
stony streets. And you, as the light crept 
between your closed eyelids, did something 
stir within you, faint as the odor from a rose 
trodden under foot? a remembrance of one 
who, far away, lay through the long watches 
of the night and thought on you — oh, forget- 
ting one, forgetting one ! 

75 


(X Cljopin Hocturne 


In the Scheibenholz * 

In the early morning the Scheibenholz is 
the children’s garden. This morning I sat 
with the nurse-girls on a bench at one side of 
a circular playground, watching the games. 

It was cool and fair; the green leaves shiv- 
ered and trembled in the light wind, and the 
sunlight sifting through bathed us in its soft 
glow. Through the arches of the trees we 
saw a low green meadow with an avenue of 
stately poplar trees beyond it. Above, shone 
misty blue the great arch of the sky, and 
beyond the road was the river reflecting the 
blue sky and the blowing leaves and blossoms 
of the fruit trees along its edge. 

A moment it snared on its glassy surface 
the zigzag flight of a butterfly, then a bird’s 
swift passing; so transient and swift its im- 
pressions; and tonight its life has died out 

* A wood near the city of Leipsic. 


76 


anb ©tijer Sfeetcfjes 


and only the mystery of darkness rests upon 
its bosom. 

“ Like the passing of the human soul is this 
river. ’ ’ 

Near me a child was making a little garden, 
building up a mound of dirt on which he 
planted bits of twigs to represent trees. Some 
were hung with green leaves, while others 
hung lifeless and dead. In this garden life 
and death met. The child ran back and forth 
pulling the grass which he scattered over the 
mound till his garden had a green cover; then 
he began building about it a little wall of 
stone. 

Near him a tiny girl paraded up and down, 
holding by the hand her doll whose red mo- 
rocco shoes dragged on the ground. Suddenly 
it slipped from her hand and fell face down- 
ward in the dirt. The little girl with an angry 
air picked up the doll and brushed off its white 
dress ; then more angrily still she shook it and 
whipped it violently on its back. 

The sound of bird wing in the air and their 
endless twittering to each other, called them a 
moment from their play. They stood with 


77 


Ct Ctjopin Hoctume 


upraised innocent eyes, staring into the clouds 
like miniatures of the early saints. 

Light and shadow chased across the grav- 
eled walks and the trees swayed in the wind; 
and as the wind blew the blossoming trees by 
the river, their petals floated lightly to the 
ground, and in the glass of the river they fell 
too, softly, softly, like little dreams of blos- 
soms, passing too swiftly o’er this one, so 
deeply sleeping. 

An old peasant woman came up to the bench 
leading a child by each hand. They tottered 
along, their weak legs bent half double, staring 
stupidly about with glazed eyes. The old 
grossmutter lifted them on to the bench 
and they sat there, staring vacantly at those 
children who, dressed in white with soft merino 
jackets, were running gayly about the wood. 

How gay they were, those children ! They 
built and dug and rolled about great painted 
balls through the cool green wood. For them 
to live was happiness. Suddenly we heard the 
sound of trampling feet, and looking up, saw a 
little procession passing through the wood. 

A stout man came first, alone, and behind 


78 


anb ©tijcr Stietcljcs 


him two by two came a band of children. 
They were children of a charity school. The 
little girls, dressed alike in clumsy woolen 
dresses, marched first. The other children 
drew out of their way, pausing from their play 
to stare curiously after them, but the charity 
children only looked straight ahead. If the 
flowers and trees called to them, they heard 
louder in their ears the rhythm of that march 
they kept step to. 

The little boys came behind, dressed in a 
kind of uniform which made them distinct 
from other children — a belted jacket of gray 
cloth and long shapeless woolen trousers. 

In the regular march of these children 
through the riotous garlanded wood there was 
something foreshadowing the years. Already 
their eyes had the angle downward ; young as 
they were they felt the overwhelming impetus 
of a destiny which had set them apart from 
others and bound them together in loneliness. 

Behind all the rest walked a tiny boy dressed 
in the uniform, and against his coarse gray 
jacket he held to his breast a little red book. 
He looked straight ahead, his feet kept beat 


79 


Q (El^optn Hocturne 


to the rhythm of the others, nor did he seem 
to notice the gay children, the green fields and 
verdure. Though the glance of this tiny atom 
destiny had stricken downward, his heart, I 
thought, felt the pressure of the little red book 
he held always against his breast. 


♦ ♦ * 


And the wood was fresh and cool ; gayly the 
children played there, laughing as they rolled 
their balls about. 

And beyond was the river, reflecting the 
sky and the blowing petals of the white blos- 
soms which fell softly, softly, like dreams, 
passing so swiftly over this one, too deeply 
sleeping. 



80 


anb ©tljer Sfeetcljes 


Delft 

When I looked out of the station at Rotter- 
dam, my first thought was that the town had 
made a mistake and walked into the water. It 
was a “ blue” day, the sunlight was brilliant, 
and I had a confused sense of a shining sea, a 
tangle of boat spars, and heavily corniced 
brick buildings. 

A Hollander who spoke English with the 
“Parisian accent” directed me to the post- 
office by means of the bridges, a manner which 
seems the fashion there. 

He said, “ Go three bridges straight ahead, 
turn to the left one bridge, and just beyond 
you’ll see a green bridge; turn this side of 
that, and cross four white bridges and there, 
on the right, beyond an iron bridge is the post- 
office.” 

I found it without difficulty, took a horse-car 


81 


d (Eljoptn ZTocturnc 


which jingled along with that tranquil indiffer- 
ence to the flight of time one notices in 
Holland, and arrived at the station just in 
time to miss the train for Delft. This gave me 
a half-hour to drink a cup of tea ; I sat down 
at a little table and ordered tea and cheese. 

In Holland everybody orders cheese, and 
though there are moments when enthusiasm 
dies out of the cheese habit, a sense of duty 
keeps one at it. Next to me two pretty girls 
read novels and nibbled their cheese and a 
Dutch cake of sweet bread and citron ; this 
cake I was to learn to know better later on. 
I ate one on my arrival in Delft and it cast a 
gloom over my entire visit. 

I had just reached the bottom of my cup 
when a jargon of horrible sounds fell on my 
ear; it was an official calling out the train for 
Delft. I hurried out, was locked in a second- 
class compartment, and was soon flying (one 
uses the word in its Dutch sense) across the 
country. 

Some dream of the land of Padua haunted 
these moist green fields ; but instead of vines, 
garlanded from young trees, one discovered 


82 


an^ ©ttjer Sbetctjes 


windmills, always windmills, like great round 
pillars of stone, supporting colossal wings, 
which beat the air into rhythmic chanting. 

Sometimes at the water’s edge crouched a 
cottage whose tiled roof rose out of the sleep- 
ing water like a dusky lotus, while moored by 
the door some old rotting barge lay, like a 
picture of sleep. 

The ancient servitor of a noted inn met me 
at the station. It was five o’clock in the after- 
noon and the town slept. The sound of 
wooden shoes on the pavement sounded in my 
ear like the rocking of a cradle. I wondered 
that the Delfite got out of bed at all, and I 
doubt if he would, if it were not for the Delft 
mosquito. 

In the shop windows were the same photo- 
graphs of Wilhelmine, the same silver orna- 
ments and coral necklaces one sees in other 
Dutch towns ; yet no one passed in or out of 
the shopdoors standing wide open the shadow 
of the green boughs on their floors. It was 
like an enchanted city. 

The drowsy stillness stole over my senses. 
I saw the place as one sees a face in a dream. 


83 


Cl £Ijopin Hocturne 


Fresh and clear it remains in my memory : a 
long clean street where the ancient servitor 
and I took our way, in the cool shadow of 
green trees whose branches fell over the glis- 
tening water, over white bridges, which in 
the dusk of the green boughs gleamed white 
with the pallor of unstained marble. 

My inn was on the market-square, with the 
cathedral at one end and the townhouse at 
the other. A spiral staircase more like a 
ladder than anything else led up to my room, 
and here I was served with the bountiful 
Dutch fare by the ancient servitor, with an 
appearance of distrust and Louis XVI. ’s coat- 
tails. 

The window of this room framed for me 
many a picture of Delft life — pictures where 
faces appeared and vanished in scenes that 
melted into each other, till tower and street 
and palace dissolved into clouds and the mind 
saw the world, a pageant of flying shadows. 

In the afterglow of the northern day, when 
at nine o’clock spires and walls glistened with 
golden light, I used to sit by this window look- 
ing down on the market-square. Two streets 
84 


anb ©tljcr SRctcljcs 


beyond rose the roof of the palace where the 
Prince of Orange met his death. I looked up 
and down the quaint street and thought that 
once on a time William the Silent passed 
in and out of these doorways. A plain enough 
house it is, yet it sheltered one who used him- 
self for a lever to lift the world, and pilgrims 
from over the seas visit it as a shrine; “pil- 
grims,” one says, and worthy are they to bear 
the name, though many are inscribed on the 
guest-book as “ Smith, ’’and hail from Dubuque 
and Michigan City. 

On the stairway they show you that most 
substantial of relics, a hole — the hole made 
by the bullet of the assassin who shot the great 
prince as he came down the stairs. They will 
show you his table and chair, and when you 
have worked up the proper enthusiasm, they 
will tell you, “These are models; the real 
are in Amsterdam.” Here are also several 
portraits of him and a statue. 

All have that peculiar expression of the 
eyes, the glance turned in, as though their 
light burned there. The face shows repose, it 
is silent as one listening, listening to something 


85 


d Cljoptn nocturne 


within. William, well called “ The Silent,** 
Prince of Orange, basely assassinated in the 
year of our Lord 1584 for the price set on his 
head: so departed a great figure by way of 
this Delft stairway. 


♦ * ♦ 

The people clatter over the wooden bridges 
and the picture fades. The lights are begin- 
ning to twinkle in the little shops around the 
square. 

In the doorway of one of them a young girl 
stands. Behind her on wall and easel hang 
old porcelain jugs and pitchers, plates of red 
and blue and brown, and those beautiful tiles 
where shepherds tend their fiocks under a sky 
soft as sleep. Through the hazy air they 
wander on, where verdure and figure, blend- 
ing into a soft monochrome, seem to unite all 
in the earth dream, sheep and shepherd, tree 
and cloud — all a fantasy, a dream out of the 
heart of the world. 

Two doors beyond the girl a young Dutch 
“ gallant ** stands staring listlessly at the ca- 
thedral. Apparently these two are absorbed in 


86 


an& ©tljcr Sfectcljes 


the music of the cathedral chimes which ring 
out clear and sweet an old melody of other 
times and men and women, dust and ashes 
now and blown about old churchyards. Sud- 
denly their glances leave the tower and sink 
to the earth like falling stars ; those glances 
meet. So “ romance ” is written. 

The lights begin to swarm over the bridges 
and up and down the canal like fireflies. The 
sound that rises from the street is the softened 
murmur of pleasure. In the morning all the 
women will be out in wooden shoes scrubbing 
off their doorsteps, that spotless is Delft kept; 
but tonight they keep festival with the bravest, 
in beautiful lace caps, starched skirts, and 
coral necklaces. 

What was it, I wonder drowsily, that the 
Delft artist told me yesterday as we sat in the 
little garden off the square? Above the trees 
rose the gray walls of towers, and down a 
narrow street one tiny cottage after another 
sat close to the water’s edge, with boxes of 
flowering shrubs in the windows. 

“ In twenty years from now there will be 
nothing to interest the artist in Holland, ’ ’ the 
87 


d Cljoptn Hocturne 


artist had said to me, staring gloomily over at 
the shops where picture post-cards jostled out 
of sight the beautiful silver filigree ornaments 
of old Holland. 

Surely the charm is on it now. People and 
landscape fit each other, and naturally, since 
the Dutch have made their own landscape. 
Some of the peasant girls, ruddy as apples, 
with reddish gold hair falling in tangled curl- 
ing locks around their sunflushed faces are 
like pictures. Those great shoulders and hips 
that look as though they must burst through 
their laced bodices and petticoats, the stout 
feet and ankles, the ample chests and bosoms, 
have the life in them of the great wind-swept 
meadows; of the long pull at the heavy mov- 
ing barges, milking of cows out of doors in sun 
and rain, and haying in the orange noon of 
Holland and in the great lonesome star-lighted 
blue nights. 

Harvest work out of doors, warm blood and 
simple content, leisure enough for rollicking 
and holidaying, this life is what paints for one 
the strong northern color, — the pictures of 
Franz Hals, Rembrandt, and old Jan Steen. 

88 


ant) 0tl}cr Skctcljes 


The lights flicker and go out, and so the 
picture fades. The bells in the cathedral 
tower strike the hour. I look up at the great 
arch of the sky, that darkly blue sky which 
but deepens its color as night comes on, and 
the wind from out its starry depth blows my 
thoughts this way and that way. 

These, our actors — 

were all spirits 

and are melted into thin air. 

And like the baseless fabric of this vision, 

The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces — 

There is a thud outside the door, it is the 
ancient servitor with my pewter- jug of hot 
water. 

“ At what hour will the gracious lady have 
breakfast?” he questions huskily through the 
keyhole. “At seven,” I call back. Then I 
glance at the feather-bed I sleep under these 
summer nights, whose comfortable depth not 
even the Delft mosquito can penetrate. 

“No, eight,” I call, and lower the window. 
I hear his footsteps fainter, fainter down the 
marble steps. A door slams, and the inn is 
silent and dark. 


89 


Ct Cljopin nocturne 


A Sunset 

It was our first sunset on the Atlantic. We 
left New York in fog and rain that followed 
us for four days. The morning of the fifth 
day we saw beginning to widen around us the 
world of the Atlantic. 

Just before night the sun, low on the hori- 
zon, shone out of the smoky sky, then the 
great disc sunk below the sea. From the 
point of its disappearance shot up a scarlet 
fire, growing slowly until it covered the sky. 
There was something ominous in its gloomy 
splendor. The sea was sullen and dark, and 
over it stretched the scarlet sky like a great 
tent. 

Silent and lifeless lay this world, from which 
no thought of mine sent into its depth returned 
to me again. 

Hearing some kind of music, I leaned over 


90 


anb ©tljer Skctcljcs 


the rail, and looked down into the steerage. 
Several hundreds of emigrants were standing 
in groups about a central figure, three young 
gprls, with arms intertwined, slowly dancing to 
the music of an accordion played by a hunch- 
back. The ends of white scarfs, bound over 
their heads, floated out around them, long flut- 
tering streamers that took strange motions 
of their own. 

Now I saw their thin white faces raised to 
mine, like stars in the dusk, then they disap- 
peared and I saw only dark whirling skirts 
and the white streamers, like wings over their 
heads. 

What a strange picture, the lonesome sea, 
the scarlet sky, and those groups of emigrants 
with their dark, saturnine faces. No one 
smiled. The hunchback looked vaguely at his 
instrument, seeming with fatalistic sadness to 
acquiesce in the incongruity between himself 
and its gayety. 

The girls whirled slowly round and round,^ 
and as the dusk deepened they became a 
strange cloudlike apparition, from which the 
eyes of one and then of another looked out 
91 


Cl Cljopin Hocturne 


from a whirling white face. Those eyes slept 
in slumbrous fire. It was as though their 
souls stood still watching. 

Like figures carved out of stone the groups 
about them never moved, some with their 
arms over each other’s shoulders, others lean- 
ing listlessly against each other like animals 
herded together. Not a lifetime but genera- 
tions of toil was branded into those dwarfed 
figures as though by fire. 

Near me, looking down on the dancing girls 
in the steerage, sat a young girl. The beauty 
of her proud disdainful face was faultless. 
Beside her stood her French maid, holding on 
her arm a cloak lined with a beautiful pale 
fur. 

Just behind me, in a room off the stairway, 
two men were playing cards, and while a little 
heap of coin was at the elbow of one of them, 
the other lost nonchalantly, laughing as he 
saw the gold spreading out over the table. 

Now as it grew late a strange change took 
place in the dusk, blending the real into the 
unreal as imperceptibly as the mist steals 
through and into the night. 


92 


anb ©tljer Sftetctjcs 


That great platform on which we sat, I saw 
now upon what pillars it rested. Those twisted 
columns beneath us were human figures. How 
heavily we pressed down upon their curving 
shoulders, between which hung their faces, 
sullen and hopeless. Some of them were 
crushed double. They looked about with 
uneasy eyes, twisting and untwisting their 
knotted fingers as they sought always to shift 
the burden from their shoulders, which settled 
slowly lower and lower. 

Now the motion of the girls became slower, 
like butterflies, pierced through and fixed, but 
fluttering faintly their gauzy wings. And now 
the great floor closed down upon them. They 
put up their trembling white fingers, their 
heads sank and drooped upon their breasts. 
Slowly they too were being crushed under. 
Their faces withered like the petals of flowers 
torn from the stalk. For a moment their sad 
eyes looked up into the sky and then like the 
others fell to the earth, never more to be 
raised again. 

And above we sat, I and the beautiful girl 
and her French maid and the two men playing 


93 


Cl Cljopin nocturne 


with heaps of yellow gold. The color died out 
of the sky; and there in the dusk we floated, 
the upper and lower decks, between a sea and 
sky which in their unfathomable dusk and 
shadow reflected ever each other’s mystery. 



94 


anb ©tl|cr Sketctjes 


A Sunday in Amsterdam 

In the early dawn I said goodby to the 
ancient servitor, feed him as one should fee a 
man who daily climbs up and down a marble 
stairway, and joined William in a third-class 
compartment where he had become entangled 
with an accordion and a charity school. 

The accordion played, the little girls smiled 
their delight, and as the early sun gilded their 
round faces and the wind blew fresh from the 
sea, the mirth of the moment captured them, 
and one by one their little muslin- capped heads 
went nodding to the music. In their low- 
necked black dresses, with short sleeves and 
knit white undersleeves, as they swayed back 
and forth they made a picture I see to this day, 
so sweet it was. 

The breeze blew fresher, the canals thick- 
ened, and suddenly the door of our compart- 


95 


(X Cljoptn nocturne 


ment was thrown open with a bang. We were 
in Amsterdam, and following the accordion we 
found ourselves sauntering beneath the trees, 
down a long street bordering a canal where lay 
moored in Sunday calm many a picturesque 
barge. One understands at last the fascina- 
tions this old water town has for the artist, as 
he walks beneath its carven gables. Many of 
the houses are painted black with white trac- 
ings. These old peaked fronts, heavily cor- 
niced, with many-paned windows, leaning at all 
angles, overhanging perhaps a bit of water, — 
where are moored two or three old barges 
which through many varnishings have taken 
on the color of old mahogany, sporting perhaps 
an old sail of dull red or yellow, — need just 
that strip of a Dutch blue sky to discover to 
one that in this northern life and color sleeps 
the spirit of the northern art. 

Those subtle creations, wrought with a spirit 
which makes them escape from the canvas, 
burn today on the walls of the Rijk’s Museum 
— Rembrandt’s Night Watch^ Cavalier and 
Lady^ and those great etchings, burnt acid- 
like out of the husk of life, the vigor of 
96 


anb ©tljer Stvetcljcs 


one who out of himself wrought lonely wood, 
and peasant and child, and running stream, 
and died, and left the mystic sign of his spirit 
on a hundred or so bits of black and white 
paper. But a spell is in them, and one who 
looks becomes little more than the remem- 
brance of a dream of times when cavaliers 
swept their plumed hats to the floor in the 
dance, as their ladies’ white hands were high 
lifted, yet always like iron kept Anger on the 
long sharp swords dangling from the silken 
scarfs at their middle. 

♦ * * 

And was it yesterday you crouched under 
that old doorway whispering to neighbor Van 
Burgh’s daughter, whose silver head ornaments 
tinkled angrily while she shrilly cursed the 
Spaniards? Your wooden shoes clattered 
together as you saw a shadow creep along the 
wall; but ’twas only William Van Burgh, Kath- 
erine’s little brother, mending his fishing net. 
And all the while Katherine hissed with 
pursed-up lips of Leyden and its slaughter, 
and suddenly with face close to yours whispered 


97 


Cl Cljopin Hocturne 


softly of the report of a terrible stroke “ The 
Silent Prince” meditated — even the lettingf in 
of the sea upon the land. You shivered as 
you looked up and down the narrow street; 
there seemed something dark and gloomy 
about the whole city, something spectral as 
though it were about to vanish in the eclipse 
of a dark tragedy. 

But all that was long ago ; and today though 
you jostle elbows with Spaniards on the boule- 
vards, they are only sailors of a servilely 
peaceful time, the glory of an unparalleled 
ferocity quenched, their mediocrity uncolored 
save by the diversion of an amiable Sunday- 
morning drunk. 


♦ ♦ * 

We turned down a narrow street paved with 
cobble stones, so narrow, by stretching out 
our arms we might have touched both sides, 
where leaning buildings threatened to topple 
down on our heads, and have been so threat- 
ening for three or four hundred years. There 
was a hissing as though the geese of the world 
had been driven into one pasture lot, and we 


98 


anJ) ©tljer Sfectctjes 


were embarked on our voyage down Amster- 
dam’s ghetto. 

“ There is a slight odor here,” said William 
with mild resentment, “not down in the guide- 
book. It is in these little things that the guide- 
book fails. Along here, somewhere lived old 
Spinoza — be careful, don’t step on the babies, 
and look out for pickpockets and peddlers — 
yes, old Spinoza lived here — but what an 
odor!” And so we pushed on through the 
shrieking, gesticulating, wheedling crowd. 
Thousands were swarming up and down the 
narrow streets, hawking, heaven knows what 
not. Strawberries in measures of braided 
ozier rods, necklaces of glass beads, lace, fish, 
cabbage, bits of tinsel, for this sharp-eyed 
people flaunt their gold with the best. And 
as we passed some prophet-like figure with 
sunken tragic eyes, a lifetime pent in by the 
stones of this street, a bevy of J ewesses in gay 
silks and gold ornaments bore down upon us, 
fingering with white-gloved fingers the gold 
rims of their eye-glasses. And everywhere 
swarms of olive-skinned children, rolling un- 
der foot, peeping out of doorways and packed 
99 

4..0* C, 


Ct (Eljopin Hoctume 


on street and sidewalk. This press, hissing 
with vitality, this masque of life hid beneath 
the grotesquerie of its grin a sinister and 
tragic aspect. If civilization is a muzzle, this 
people have theirs screwed on a little tighter 
than the rest of us, but the difference is of 
degree. Our brother of the ghetto has been 
sharpened by the stones of his narrow streets. 

We stopped a moment in a doorway to watch 
the crowd. Portly Jewesses, with none of 
your little prejudices to dirt, baked in iron 
stoves set by their doorways cakes of meal, 
which they sold to the small boy who, in 
ornamented trousers, discussed their merits, in 
a voice which might have been heard a mile, 
with tiny yellow maidens with golden hoops 
in their ears. These hoops seemed to prove 
seductive; for we saw old sailors, brown as 
bark, with queer shiny blue eyes, picked out in 
gold leaf to equal the early saints by means 
of enormous hoops of gold in their ears. 

Amsterdam is your true cosmopolitan on a 
Sunday. In the harbor fly the flags of nations, 
and on the boulevards the country hobnobs 
with the town, with dawdling tourists, Portu- 
100 


on& 0tljcr Sketcljcs 


guese, Jews, and sailors sandwiched between. 
There were ladies in their carriages, men of 
fashion, wooden-shoed urchins, buxom girls 
in tight-laced bodices, and old dames in snowy 
caps and short sleeves, whose withered arms 
resembled more a war map than the skin 
human, so many epochs of toil had plowed 
scars there. Custom kept visible the hideous- 
ness of those old arms, and after all there was 
a kind of fitness in it not unesthetic. 

We secured an ancient mariner who spoke 
the fragments of a half-dozen languages to 
row us out across the bay; and many a tale of 
adventure, many a hoary-headed lie he regaled 
us with, as he spat into the water or into the 
bottom of the boat as the mood seized him, 
for he was a “ fanciful cuss *’ as Artemus Ward 
would say. When I pointed out to him an 
island and asked him if the fisherwomen lived 
there, he replied genially, “Yaas — and the 
fisher-gentlemens too.’' When we landed he 
conducted us on an expedition of discovery, 
leaning against the sides of the buildings and 
placing one Argus eye against the window- 
pane in a manner which sometimes elicited 


101 


Cl Cljoptn nocturne 


screams from the inmates of the cottages, who 
were often discovered in the mysteries of the 
toilette. Nothing more spotlessly clean than 
these cottages can be imagined. If you were 
five and a half feet tall you might cover their 
area without a yardstick, but usually there is 
a tiny kitchen stuck on the rear. Muslin cur- 
tains, wooden chairs with gay cushions, and 
old dames sitting by the doorway knitting in 
snowy caps, old mothers of the sea with none 
of the fine manners of your great ones who 
live off the labor of others, yet with a touch of 
stately dignity, as of those who know their 
place and their right to it — there’s the picture 
and I love it. 

Even though costumes and customs change, 
one feels in traveling over Holland that these 
are the people Hals and Rembrandt painted. 
A people busy in the performance of real 
things. They felt, those old painters, how 
near to the side of tragedy jostles the elbow 
of comedy, and how these things need not the 
grandiose to express them ; that even in the 
history of the humblest there is a real which 
unites us to it and makes us part of an invisible 


102 


anb ®tljer Sfeetcljcs 


whole. They knew the balance, too, which 
gives to humor its true proportions to the 
serious, and the grotesquerie of life they 
seldom sink to. 

The beauty of the southern Venice, thi^^ old 
water town cannot dispute; for her is the more 
ethical charm of the north. For in those 
climates where men fish and trade and build 
in cold and wet and wind one half the year, 
mere existence too often wears a terrible and 
sad aspect ; sad necessity chastens and beauty 
is the seldom guest. Such a people look 
beneath the dark face of life to read the hidden 
meaning. So it is that a northern people are 
more ethical than a southern, and their art, 
though grand, is often austere, their mirth 
tinctured with irony. 

So in the end one comes back, not to the art 
of one people but of the world. As one sees 
in some cathedral mixed with the purest form 
and ornamentation some vulgar and obscene 
sign, the grotesque and the beautiful in con- 
fused juxtaposition, so one learns a reverence 
for those who wrought, who seized upon the 
mean and vulgar and worked them into a 


103 


Q (Eljoptn nocturne 


symbol to spell out their part of the message 
of a great edifice so typical of life. Indeed a 
symbol — of the struggle of form against form, 
of beauty, chastity, obscenity, and death ; 
which seems, too, to hint of something that 
remains after stained glass and carven tomb 
are dust. 


♦ * * 

As we get out into the meadows, we look 
back on the town. The setting sun, gilding its 
spires and walls, turns them into flame ; and 
voices seem to call out of them a history of 
times when the daring of their merchants 
covered the sea with their fleets, of great 
soldiers and statesmen, of noble painters, 
cavaliers, and grand dames. 

But distance creeps between like a mist, the 
noble city has vanished, and up from the mead- 
ows and marshes creeps the shadow of night. 



104 


anb ©tijet Skctdjes 


The Home-Coming 

And so we came home across the meadows 
when the sun was sinking low, its long beams 
raking the level land. And we could see down 
little side canals where trees and bushes 
Plugged the water’s edge, and the gardens 
bloomed in flower patches of red and blue and 
yellow, with a thatched cottage set in their 
midst, and moored by the door some old 
rotting barge. 

The rushes along the canals trembled as a 
wind sprang up whispering of the night, and 
as the sun went down a mist rose stealthily 
like the breath of one dying caught on a look- 
ing-glass, till we saw only the windmills 
looming up like giants and throwing out their 
great shadowy arms toward us. And the mist 
grew into a pale vapor that shrouded every- 
thing. Mist and mist, with the sun gone and 


105 


Cl Cl?optn Hoctume 


the earth drunk up. Sometimes in the still- 
ness we would suddenly hear voices, then the 
dark side of a barge would slip out of the 
vapor to vanish the next instant into the night. 

We got into Rotterdam at nine o’clock and 
went to a caf^ where a waiter answered our 
French in English and a barrel-organ turned 
out Daisy ^ and After the Ball. Then we 
took a walk along the canal and saw another 
city than Rotterdam — a great river of glitter- 
ing water where slept innumerable barges and 
ships, their masts like slender needles against 
the blue of the sky; and that sky (for the 
night had cleared) so blue, as though the dust 
of millions of blue flowers had been blown 
into the air and were floating there. 

Rotterdam swam in light ; the arches of her 
bridges glistened against the sky and boats and 
barges were on fire with different-colored lamps 
that swarmed over the canals like fireflies. 

And we saw the moon, silver and pale, and 
against it as though sharply etched into it 
were the spars of ships. That same moon we 
had seen shining down on Venice’s Grand 
Canal when we heard the soft lap-lap of the 


106 


anb ©tljer Skctcljcs 


gondolier’s oar and heard whispers and low 
laughter and a sigh, — oh, sad as though from 
a breaking heart, — yet saw no one; we were 
alone and the tide was pulling at the breast of 
our boat to carry us out to sea. And the moon 
shone down, and I saw its light as through 
tears, the prescience of a coming sorrow whose 
shadow crept between me and the silver light. 


♦ ♦ ♦ 


But that was long ago and these are the 
lights of Rotterdam; and I might travel many 
a day but never should I find again that Vene« 
tian spring night, lighted with its splendid 
star. 

Never again; for between me and the silver 
light the shadow has deepened and the light 
is out. 



107 


<3 Cljopin Hocturnc 


Epilogue 

The tall girl laid down the manuscript. The 
light from the court, golden at this last hour 
of the sun, sifted through the window, light- 
ing up the walls covered with photographs 
and sketches by Klinger and Sasche Schneider ; 
it sank lower till it fell on the dark heads of the 
two girls half buried in the cushions of the 
lounge. 

The singer raised herself on her elbow. 

All her old towns seem falling asleep.” 

” Every person looking into the lighted 
world sees a different picture. The world 
without may remain the same, but the essence 
of being whose transfusion with the visible 
creates the picture, is forever varying.” 

“Well,” said the pianist, yawning slightly, 

I consider she ends badly, for she began 
with the world and ends in a Dutch cafd. ’ ' 


108 


anb 0tljcr Sltctcljes 


The singer sank back on her cushions. “ In 
this I hold with her, for all of life is in that 
sentence. We have hardly begun before we 
end, and we begin by promising too much and 
end by performing too little, and are glad to 
cover ourselves in that oblivion it has been 
our passionate effort to escape from.” 

The violinist opened a desk and laid the 
manuscript in it. From the apartments next 
to them sounded the notes of a French horn. 

Mein Hebe Schwan, hummed the singer in 
sweet tones. 

” After all,” mused the pianist, “how little 
one sees and learns, who merely walks up and 
down old streets, of the life hidden away under 
gilded domes and towers, the invisible joy and 
trouble of the world ! ’ ’ 

The violinist shook her head. “ They too 
are symbols of joy and trouble, though we 
misunderstand them. For these old streets 
can tell a story of things wrought out to a 
conclusion beyond the moment either of joy or 
sorrow into that which, beneath the vanishing 
and disappearing, remains, the essence of an 
eternal idealism. ' ’ 


109 


Ct (Eljopin Hocturne, etc 


“In other words — art,” said the pianist, 
and smiled. 

They lifted the curtain to catch the last 
gleam of daylight. From the court came the 
sound of children’s voices blending with the 
notes of the French horn which played softly, 
Mein Hebe Schwan^ mein Hebe Schwan. 

The glow which glistened on the ceiling sank 
lower; it touched the crumpled rose leaves on 
the lid of the piano, and on the white plaster 
casts of the musicians it fell as though before 
them were placed burning tapers. 

Even when it darkened, they still shone 
out — Schumann’s beautiful, weary face, and 
Beethoven with a sad and bitter smile, looking 
down on the little room with its litter of books 
and music, and on the three girls watching in 
silence for the first appearance of the stars 
above the house roofs. 



110 


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